What does NATO do for you? Advancing the debate on NATO’s endurance and enlargement

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Austin Cooper and Maaike Verbruggen for exchanges about this essay.

Notes

¹ Susan Colbourn makes this point eloquently in ‘NATO as a Political Alliance: Continuities and Legacies in the Enlargement Debates of the 1990s’, in Goldgeier, J. and Shifrinson, J. R. I. (eds.), Evaluating NATO Enlargement: From Cold War Victory to the Russia-Ukraine War (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan 2023), 73–96.

² Timothy Sayle, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press 2019), 244.

³ Evaluations of the past are often combined with prescriptions or guidelines for the future, see for example Alberque and Schreer, ‘Finland, Sweden and NATO Membership’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 64/3 (2022), 67–72; Kupchan, ‘The origins and future of NATO enlargement’, Contemporary Security Policy 21/2 (2000), 127–148. for a broader argument in this regard, see Balzacq, Dombrowski Reich, ‘Is Grand Strategy a Research Program? A Review Essay’ Security Studies 28/1 (2019), 58–86.

⁴ Sayle, Enduring Alliance, 3.

⁵ M. E. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (New Haven: Yale University Press 2021), 3.

⁶ Gunitsky, ‘Rival Visions of Parsimony’, International Studies Quarterly 63/3 (2019), 707–716; Levy, ‘Too Important to Leave to the Other: History and Political Science in the Study of International Relations’, International Security 22/1 (1997), 22–33.

⁷ See also Robert Jervis, ‘H-Diplo Essay 198 – Robert Jervis on Learning the Scholar’s Craft’ (April 2020).

⁸ Nancy Kim, Judgment and Decision-Making: In the Lab and the World (London: Bloomsbury Publishing 2018), 65–83.

⁹ The author would like to thank Austin Cooper for bringing this to her attention.

¹⁰ Levy ‘Learning and foreign policy: Sweeping a conceptual minefield’, International Organization 48/2 (1994), 279–312.

¹¹ Sayle, Enduring Alliance, 7.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ This is also what Kimberly Marten alludes to in ‘NATO Enlargement: Evaluating Its Consequences’, in Evaluating NATO Enlargement: From Cold War Victory to the Russia-Ukraine War, eds. Goldgeier, J. and Shifrinson, J. R. I. (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave McMillan 2023), 209–249.

¹⁴ Kim, Judgment and Decision-Making, 219–234.

¹⁵ M. E. Sarotte, ‘NATO’s Worst-of-Both-Worlds Approach to Ukraine’, Foreign Affairs, 10 July 2023.

¹⁶ Rebecca Moore ‘Ukraine’s Bid to Join NATO: Re-evaluating Enlargement in a New Strategic Context’, in Goldgeier, J. and Shifrinson, J. R. I. (eds.), Evaluating NATO Enlargement: From Cold War Victory to the Russia-Ukraine War (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan 2023), 373–414.

¹⁷ Rajan Menon and William Ruger, ‘NATO Enlargement and US Grand Strategy: A Net Assessment’, in Goldgeier, J. and Shifrinson, J. R. I. (eds.), Evaluating NATO Enlargement: From Cold War Victory to the Russia-Ukraine War (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan 2023), 165–208.

¹⁸ For an argument along these lines, see Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson, ‘Don’t Let Ukraine Join NATO: The Costs of Expanding the Alliance Outweigh the Benefits”, Foreign Affairs, 7 July 2023.

¹⁹ Alexander Lanoszka hints at this logic in ‘Thank Goodness for NATO Enlargement’, in Goldgeier, J. and Shifrinson, J. R. I. (eds.), Evaluating NATO Enlargement: From Cold War Victory to the Russia-Ukraine War (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan 2023), 307–339.

²⁰ James Politi, ‘Former NATO Chief calls for Economic Version of Article 5 Defence Pledge’, Financial Times, 10 June 2022.

²¹ Sara Bjerg Moller, ‘Assessing the Consequences of Enlargement for the NATO Military Alliance’, in Goldgeier, J. and Shifrinson, J. R. I. (eds.),Evaluating NATO Enlargement: From Cold War Victory to the Russia-Ukraine War (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan 2023), 460.

²² Robert Jervis as quoted in Deborah Welch Larson, ‘Learning From History’, ISSF Jervis Tribute, available here: https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Jervis-Tribute-1.pdf.

²³ Sayle, Enduring Alliance, 4.

²⁴ Sayle at times alludes to this but does not provide decisive evidence to make this very point.

²⁵ See also Jervis ‘Liberalism, the blob, and American foreign policy: Evidence and methodology’, Security Studies 29/3 (2020), 343–456.

²⁶ Sandra Lavenex and Ivo Krizic, ‘Governance, Effectiveness and Legitimacy in Differentiated Integration: An Analytical Framework’, The International Spectator: Italian Journal of International Affairs Vol 57/1, 35–53; Perot and Klose ‘Spot the Difference: Differentiated Co-operation and Differentiated Integration in the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies 61/1 (2023), 259–276.

²⁷ Lanoszka alludes to this in ‘Thank Goodness for NATO Enlargement’; Colbourn makes precisely this case in ‘NATO as a Political Alliance: Continuities and Legacies in the Enlargement Debates of the 1990s’.

²⁸ Tony Insall and Patrick Salmon, The Brussels and North Atlantic Treaties, 1947–1949 (Abingdon & New York: Routledge 2015), 455; Art 42.7 of the Treaty of Lisbon of the European Union effectively replaced a modified version of the Brussels Treaty. As a result, the Brussels Treaty was terminated in 2010.

²⁹ Congressional Research Service, ‘NATO and the European Union’, 29 January 2008.

³⁰ For an excellent example, see Horovitz and Götz ‘The overlooked importance of economics: Why the Bush Administration wanted NATO enlargement’, Journal of Strategic Studies 43/6–7 (2021), 847–868.

³¹ Douglas T. Stuart and William T. Tow, The Limits of Alliance: NATO out-of-area problems since 1949 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1990)

³² Insall and Salmon, The Brussels and North Atlantic Treaties, 1947–1949, 460.

³³ Stuart and Tow, The Limits of Alliance: NATO out-of-area problems since 1949, 175–245; see also Martin Thomas, The French North African Crises: Colonial Breakdown and Anglo-French Relations, 1945–1962 (London: Palgrave MacMillan 2000), 158–178.

³⁴ See also Howard W. French, ‘Why Ukraine is Not a Priority for the Global South’, Foreign Policy, 19 September 2023.

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Linde Desmaele

Linde Desmaele is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the MIT Security Studies Program and a Senior Associate Researcher (Non-Resident) at the Centre of Security, Diplomacy, and Strategy (CSDS) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She is the author of Europe’s Evolving Role in US Grand Strategy: Indispensable or Insufferable? (London & New York: Routledge, 2023).